National Liberation Movements and the Question of Socialism ...

modern social life:
... the struggle for the solution has outgrown
the traditional forms. ~he t~talitarian
tendencies of the one-d1mens1onal
society render the traditional ways and
means of protest ineffective--perhaps even
dangerous because they preserve the illusion
of popular sovereignty .... However, underneath
the conservative popular base is the
substratum of the outcasts and outsiders,
the exploited and persecuted of other races
and other colours, the unemployed and the
unemployable. They exist outside the democratic
process; their life is the most
immediate and the most real need for ending
intolerable conditions and institutions.
Thus their oppostion is revolutionary, even
if their consciousness is not. Their opposition
hits the system from without and is
therefore not deflected by the system; it
is an ele~entary force which violates the
the rules of the game, and, in doing so,
reveals it as a rigged game.
(Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, p. 200.)
Moreover, for Marcuse the main "revolutionary"
element among these outsiders is the lumpen.
This basic theme, the rejection of Marxist theory
and the working class itself coupled with the adoption
of a petty bourgeois ideology with its emphasis on the
peasantry, runs through the literature of the 1960's
and 1970's. Given the void created by the domination
of the revisionists in the Soviet Union and the People's
Democracies, this nationalist, individualist perspective
could not but find itself in an increasingly
dominant position, thus permeating the ideas of those
who entered left politics during the period (not to
mention those who had established positions but found
their ideological bearings gone awry as a result of
revisionist teachings). And, in the current period,
this misplaced theoretical perspective continues to
haunt the left, making it impossible to form correct
judgements on national liberation movements, leading
to political support for the wrong section of the
colonial population. But this means that national
liberation itself will not succeed because political
leadership falls to the capitalists of those countries
who do not want complete liberation, nor liberation
at all. And this means that the underlying population
of those countries, including the peasantry, will continue
to suffer. Let us illustrate.
On Modern Liberation Movements
Consider as one example of the above argument the
situation in El Salvador. Let us make it clear at the
outset that we assign the blame for the carnage in
that beleaguered country to the U.S. Government, which
is acting at the behest of large businessmen who have
interests in Central America and who are concerned that
~change in the political and economic arrangements
of El Salvador (or Nicaragua or wherever) will injure
their long-run well-being in that area. At the same
time, it is reasonably clear that the strategy and
tactics of the FMLN-FDR have not resulted in the victory
that was once thought to be in its grasp. More
i~portant, though, is the fact that recent developments
in the program of the FMLN-FDR have made it
increasingly clear that the working class does not
have political leadership in either the FMLN or the
FOR and that if independence is won (which, of course,
would be a good development) El Salvador will come
under the internal control of its native businessmen-­
which means continued control by imperialists.
A recent report in NACLA summarizes the current
program of the FMLN-FDR:
The FMLN-FDR's proposal for a Government of
Broad Participation seems to reflect a decision
to abandon revolutionary idealism in favor of
a political realism. Its principal elements
include:
--the demand for a direct share in power,
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